The future of archaeology: ancient for the future

International Scientific Conference: Archaeology in the 21st Century (2019)

Abstract:

The vision of linear time in which we have been embedded (if not embodied), identifies the past with what is behind and the future with what lies ahead. However Archaeology, despite the fact that many colleagues still insist on linking Archaeology to chronology and the past, no longer uses/should use these simple notions of temporality that derive from modernity. Archaeological practices increasingly mobilizes much more complex representations of social time. The future is where we're going, and we see it ahead. But the past is what allows us to go there and it is also ahead of us because we have seen and still see it; we do not forget it. When we look straight ahead, space and time fold in front of us to superimpose the past we were, and the future we want to be. In fact, cognitive science knows that the sense of sight has at least as much to do with memory as with the visual perceptual stimuli we receive. Moreover, this view I am addressing is directly related to the cultural concept of time and space in the Andean world. If we accepted this (instead of agreeing with metaphysical categories of linear time as scientific and proven when they are only modern, historical and western), then perhaps we would better understand the problems we face today when the categories inherited from Modernity are no longer sufficient to explain what is happening to us. It's not that the past returns: it's that it was always there. Based on these ideas, I will present some reflections about how thinking about the contribution of archaeology for the building the future, about what issues will be more important and about how, in spite of our best will, this effort fails the most of the time. But it is because we are thinking >today> how to solve problems of >tomorrow> with the ideas of >yesterday>. We should change this perspective with the ideal I outlined above: we should think the solutions of >tomorrow> with our foots places in the >after-tomorrow>. For this, we do not need an Einstein-Rosen bridge; we have got archaeology.